Japan is the novel’s home ground and a contested historical frame: a place of family life, work, and private longing, but also the center of social hierarchies and an empire whose wartime actions leave consequences far beyond the islands. Through memories, testimony, and present-day choices, the book connects intimate histories to the country’s expansion into Manchuria, its defeat, and the difficult aftermath of that defeat.

Domestic life and social order

In contemporary Japan, the country appears first through ordinary arrangements that define where a person belongs. Toru Okada and Kumiko live in Tokyo, and, after leaving a Koenji apartment, move into a house in Setagaya that belongs to Toru’s uncle. The arrangement is provisional: the uncle charges nominal rent and requires three months’ notice when he needs the property back. Even so, the yard and the feeling of having a house give the couple a sense of being a household. The home is thus both a lived domestic space and a place whose security depends on someone else’s ownership.

Kumiko’s childhood makes that dependence more painful. At three, she was sent from Tokyo to live with her grandmother in Niigata. Her parents explained the move as a response to her supposedly frail health, but Kumiko doubted that account. A family story connected the decision to a long-running conflict between her mother and grandmother: the child’s presence in Niigata had served as a kind of settlement between adults. Kumiko understood that she had been treated as a convenient solution, and later reflected that her parents had not grasped what being sent away could mean to a small child. Her experience gives geographic separation an intimate force: the family’s negotiations are registered in the life of the child who is moved between them.

The Wataya household also embodies a social ideal organized around competition. Kumiko’s father regarded Japanese society as a hierarchy in which the weak were overtaken by the strong, and insisted that a person had to reach the elite to live fully. He passed that conviction on to Noboru Wataya, furnishing his son with tutors and rewarding academic success while demanding that he preserve his position at the top. Noboru’s childhood was materially privileged but tightly directed; his feelings remained inaccessible even to Kumiko. His mother, meanwhile, focused on her husband’s standing in government and her son’s performance, adopting her husband’s views rather than forming independent ones. This family portrait links private upbringing to a wider social order in which rank, achievement, and appearance govern what is valued.

War, empire, and historical memory

The novel’s accounts of Japan’s imperial past are presented through recollection, not as a distant abstraction. In the late 1930s, an officer stationed in Hsin-ching describes a comparatively comfortable life among military personnel while a wider war with China expanded and relations with America deteriorated. That local ease was an illusion. In 1938, the officer was assigned to escort Yamamoto, a civilian presented as an investigator of Mongolian life, on a mission near the border. The officer’s knowledge of the region’s topography and the need to improve maps made him useful, while the mission’s small escort avoided attracting attention from forces across the border. The maps themselves were politically sensitive: unilateral decisions about the boundary risked conflict with the Soviet Union and Outer Mongolia, while the Kwantung Army had limited capacity for another major war.

The geography of the border reveals a collision between administrative claims and older ways of inhabiting land. The officer observes that the western Manchurian landscape is immense and that Mongolian nomads had lived there for generations without needing the borders imposed by states. Yet the army sought more exact maps to consolidate its position in Manchukuo. The narrative makes the map more than a technical instrument: its supposed precision is bound to the political power to claim and govern territory, and to the danger of turning a disputed line into an international crisis.

The later collapse of Manchukuo exposes the human costs concealed by imperial claims. As Soviet forces advanced toward Hsin-ching, the Kwantung Army withdrew its main force, leaving border garrisons and Japanese civilian settlers exposed. Farmers were killed during the advance; some women faced death rather than capture. Border troops fought without support and were overwhelmed, while senior officials arranged transfers and the puppet emperor and his family fled by private train. Chinese members of the Manchukuo Army deserted or rebelled rather than sacrifice themselves for Japan. The capital, once built to represent the modern Japanese state’s project in the wilderness, was left in a political vacuum. The account shows defeat not as a single military reversal but as the unravelling of a colonial system whose protectors abandoned those left in its path.

The animal executions at the Hsin-ching zoo belong to this same unraveling. Soldiers killed zoo animals as the city prepared for battle, and Chinese workers later offered to remove the bodies in return for their hides and meat. The veterinarian accepted because there was no practical alternative. Their transaction reflects both the immediate scarcity of a besieged city and the changing balance of power: the workers determined the terms because it was their country. The incident carries the larger history of occupation into a confined, concrete aftermath, where imperial authority persists in official procedures even as its control is disappearing.

Exile, return, and responsibility

The consequences of imperial defeat extend into postwar family life. Nutmeg Akasaka and her mother escaped from Manchuria to Japan carrying only the jewelry they could wear. They traveled to Yokohama to stay with the mother’s family, whose business had suffered after Japan lost Taiwan and whose prospects had further diminished through wartime deaths and financial decline. As dependants in a household with limited resources, mother and daughter tried not to impose: they took less at meals, woke early for chores, and made do with cast-off clothing and pencil stubs. Nutmeg remembers that her mother, once active, seemed unable to recover her strength after the escape. The end of empire is therefore registered not only in political collapse but in displacement, dependence, and the work of starting over.

Nutmeg found a route toward independence through design. She left high school for dressmaking school, persuading her mother to sell a remaining piece of jewelry to pay the tuition. After two years of training, she lived alone, supported herself through service work and sewing jobs, and continued to professional fashion school. She later joined a clothing manufacturer and earned a place in its design department. Her trajectory does not erase the poverty and loss that preceded it; it shows the effort by which a displaced young woman made a livelihood and a distinct creative identity in postwar Japan.

The war’s ethical aftermath also appears in Lieutenant Mamiya’s recollections. After imprisonment and ideological training, he was sent to a Siberian coal mine as an interpreter between Japanese prisoners and their Soviet captors. His experience left him unable to accept political ideology merely as a set of principles. He had seen Soviet oppression in Mongolia and the consequences of Japanese actions in Manchuria, including Chinese laborers killed to protect the secrecy of a military construction project. His account refuses to let Japanese responsibility disappear inside the story of Japanese suffering as prisoners: the violence he remembers is connected to actions committed by Japan as well as to the conditions of his own captivity.

Home, departure, and the limits of belonging

Japan remains the place to which characters return, but not a guarantee of restored belonging. After years of isolation and uncertainty, Creta Kano describes living in Japan as a period of reconstructing herself through experience, without guidance or a book that could explain what had happened to her. Her sister Malta Kano was far away on Malta, leaving Creta to work out her life alone. The distance between the sisters is an absence inside Japan as much as a geographical separation beyond it: Creta has to build a self without access to the person with whom she might have shared what she knew.

At a later moment, Toru considers leaving Japan, even though he has not decided where he will go or whether departure is possible. When May Kasahara presses him about his plans, he names Crete as one possibility, then qualifies the idea: he must first settle things with Kumiko. The exchange leaves departure unresolved. Japan is neither simply a home to remain in nor a destination definitively rejected; it is the setting of the unsettled relationship and decision that Toru cannot leave behind by traveling elsewhere.

The novel’s changing locations give this uncertainty a material form. After emerging from the well, Toru finds the familiar neighborhood altered in feeling, as though a new reality had replaced the old one. Later, the vacant Miyawaki house has been demolished; where the well, trees, and bird sculpture once stood is a fenced, flattened stretch of earth. Toru can hardly reconcile the empty plot with his memory of descending into the well. The transformation is local, but it resonates with the book’s wider treatment of Japan: homes and landscapes are not stable containers for identity or history. They bear traces of relationships and past events, even when the visible structures that held those traces have disappeared.